No Sports, Lots of Spin

When it comes to providing misleading information, Dubya's flack Ari Fleischer isn't alone -- the left is perfectly capable of it as well. In a press statement released Saturday, Scott Cobb of the Texas Moratorium Network boldly declared, "Unfair Death Penalty Causes Texas to Lose 2007 Pan-American Games." That morning, the Pan American Sports Organization, meeting in Mexico City, had picked Rio de Janeiro over San Antonio to host the quadrennial mini-Olympics for countries in the Western Hemisphere. According to Cobb, PASO made its decision based on Texas' execution of a Mexican citizen earlier this month.

"Governor [Rick] Perry made a major blunder by refusing to stay Javier Suarez Medina's execution and then going to Mexico to ask the nations of Latin America to send their people to San Antonio for the Pan American Games," Cobb wrote on behalf of the TMN, which supports a moratorium on executions so the state can study its use of the death penalty. "The PASO delegates, representing the people of Latin America, sent a message that Texas needs to clean up its act. They apparently felt that the Pan American Games should be awarded to a country where participants and international sports fans, especially from Latin America, will not be in danger of having their human rights violated by the host nation.

"The Texas death penalty has now cost the people of Texas hundreds, if not thousands, of jobs that would have been created by staging the Pan American Games in San Antonio," Cobb concluded.

Yet little evidence suggests Cobb's argument is true; Naked City couldn't find any press accounts to solidly support his claims. "We hear that some of the [PASO] delegates were upset with this month's execution," Edmund Tijerina, a political gossip columnist for the San Antonio Express-News, wrote on Sunday, but the sources were only secondhand. A search of the Nexis news database turned up many stories on the games; a few noted that the Mexican media had peppered Perry with questions regarding Suarez, but none suggested that San Antonio's loss of the games was related to the execution.

Asked to back up his statement with facts, Cobb told Naked City the reasons San Antonio lost the games were "myriad," but that be believes Suarez's execution played a role. "I don't have any delegates [on record]," he said. "It's just an assumption based on our communications with the president of [PASO]. I personally sent him a letter. Of course, you never know if he read it." Further hurting his case: Brazil abolished the death penalty in 1979 for "ordinary crimes" but still allows it in special cases, such as in wartime. Amnesty International has condemned Brazil as a major human rights violator.

By all accounts, Rio more likely won because San Antonio has the River Walk, and Rio has ... well, Rio. Perhaps Perry did hurt San Antonio, however, when he presented a silver medallion emblazoned with a Lone Star to the head of Brazil's Olympic Committee, and then told PASO delegates that, in a two-way race, Rio would take the silver. TMN's press release is available at www.texasmoratorium.org/article.php?sid=142.